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The Atlantic City summer that nearly ruined Donald Trump
(CNN) Donald Trump walked up to a gold genie lantern, adorned with glowing red lights, and rubbed the side of it. Smoke swirled around him and a cracking sound filled the cavernous hall. On a theater-sized screen, the genie appeared.
"Good evening, master," the genie said to Trump.
It was April 1990, and the palatial Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City was sold out on its opening week, drawing crowds by the thousands.
Trump paraded around with A-listers from Michael Jackson to New Jersey's governor. Throngs of people shouted "Donald! Donald!" as he walked across marble floors and oversized plush carpets that sat beneath $14 million worth of Austrian crystal chandeliers.
"They talk about a million dollars a day," Trump told reporters -- a response to claims that the casino needed to bring in huge funds to cover its debt. "I think we've done that in the first few hours."
Today, the Taj Mahal's now-faded and frayed façade reveals what Trump wasn't saying in 1990: that his casinos were failing -- and that he almost brought down the city.
Lufthansa heist trial highlights struggles of aging wise guys
New York (CNN)In 2008, a lifelong Mafia associate picked up the phone and dialed a random number at the FBI in New York.
"I'd like to cooperate," Gaspare Valenti, now 68, recalled saying on the phone to a woman named Nora. She happened to head a federal law enforcement squad investigating the Bonanno crime family.
"I have remorse in me and need ways to support my family," Valenti said in the call.
For the next five years, Valenti arranged to receive about $3,000 a month to record conversations, including some with his first cousin, Vincent Asaro, an alleged Bonanno family captain.
The recordings were critical in bringing federal charges, more than 30 years after the crime, against five alleged Bonanno crime family members in the infamous Lufthansa heist that helped inspire part of the 1990 film "Goodfellas."
The hours of wire and telephone recordings have been played in Asaro's federal trial in Brooklyn on a string of charges that include murder, racketeering and the 1978 airport heist.
With the tapes, prosecutors have sought to portray Asaro, 80, as an aging and broke wise guy, insecure of his position within the family and nostalgic for the days when an illegal and lucrative ecosystem controlled large swaths of New York with a degree of impunity.
On eBay, one of Oskar Schindler's life-saving lists
Potential bidders at the auction website eBay can zoom in on a neatly-typed list of hundreds of factory workers spared almost certain death at Nazi concentration camps.
One of Oskar Schindler's original lists was posted Thursday night with a starting bid request of $3 million.
The German businessman became a Nazi and operated enamel factories in Poland, producing pots and pans using forced Jewish laborers during World War II.
In order to save 1,200 prisoners, Schindler opened an armaments factory in Brunnlitz, present-day Czech Republic, to convince his superiors Jews were vital to the work production.
The transfer of these workers was drawn up on multiple lists, collectively known as "Schindler's List," according to Steven Luckert, curator of permanent exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Schindler's List became a household name in 1993 when Steven Spielberg directed the Academy Award-winning classic movie of the same name.
Eric Gazin, president of Auction Cause, which listed the historical document, says it is one of the original lists typed by Schindler's accountant, Itzhak Stern, and its authenticity is "ironclad."